Although Norris McWhirter would never have dared venture inside, it's likely that the world record for the largest concentration of old-skool magic marker graffiti in a single location would have been held by an eighties railway station waiting room. Across the nation, years of neglect, underfunding, bureaucratic red tape and a general lack of interest in maintaining anything municipal beyond a basic level of functionality had allowed layer upon layer upon layer of scrawl to build up on walls that would have put the end titles of Murphy's Mob to shame, and would certainly have provided graffiti-compiling curmudgeon Nigel Rees with enough material to comfortably retire on.
Although the cumulative effect of so much handwritten text in alternating primary colours would have suggested little more to the untrained eye than that Mr. Messy had exploded, more discerning observers could just about trace an evolving subcultural history of nothing in particular through the dense lexicographical cacophony. Trends replaced trends, slang replaced slang, and not particularly coded threats to 'Bopper' for being a 'grass' replaced not particularly coded threats to his equally unimaginatively nicknamed antecedents. And weirdly agressively punctuated rewrites of Row Row Row Your Boat to be about rolling joints somehow managed to remain indelibly visible through the whole lot.
If there was one recurring graffitic totem that seemed to epitomise the simultaneous permanence and futility of unattended public walls in a rapidly changing world, it was that early eighties rallying cry 'Punk's Not Dead'. As Richard Herring has noted, this brave, defiant and principled stand against the vagaries of fashion and the rise of materialism would invariably be rendered inert by someone crossing out the 'not', and someone else - and it was never the same person - judiciously adding an 'S'. In gamely attempting to convince the world at large that punk was still a viable force, its few remaining adherents had left themselves wide open for humiliating public demolition, and quite possibly came to regret spending their small change on a marker pen rather than helping to push The Exploited slightly nearer the top forty. And it was probably at this precise moment that punks ceased to be frightening to the world at large.
Quite why they were any more deserving of this status than any other youth cult (including some more genuinely threatening ones) is something of a mystery - though those zany Sex Pistols saying 'barstard' at Bill Grundy might have had something to do with it - but punks loomed larger in the juvenile catalogue of terrifying peers than perhaps any other historical equivalent ever. Indeed, even well into the 'Punk's Not Dead' era, it was not unusual for school playgrounds to reverberate with distressed reports of 'a punk' on the rampage in the vicinity, usually accompanied by Godzilla-esque tales of them headbutting chunks out of buildings whilst a small army of police cowered helplessly behind riot shields.
But by the time of Channel 4's celebration of the, erm, Fourteenth Anniversary of Punk, though, they had seemingly lost all of their terror-generating cachet. Old ladies would write to newspapers expressing gratitude to 'punks' that had tackled a bag-snatcher. Ludicrously mohicanned male model Matt Belgrano established himself as the Wogan-friendly face of anarchy. Even the tabloid press started to view them as some sort of loveable friend-in-need in the fight against the 'dangerous' dogs, ecstasy-addled hordes and obvious hoaxes about 'live' ghost-hunting that had become the new public bete noires. After all, SOMEONE needed to take a stand against whoever it was that had started appending smiley faces with wizard's hats to the railway station waiting room walls.
Nowadays you're more likely to find those selfsame railway station waiting rooms covered in coffee dispensers and adverts with similing mug-wielding monochrome girls endorsing 'Cafe Ainnichuchi' or whatever the latest one's called. And nobody's ever written anything on their faces either. But spare a thought for those defiant idealist punks who felt the best way to preserve the integrity of a youth movement that once had the establishment quaking and the charts rigged was to plead their case to a handful of rain-drenched commuters. Remember them this way: as a spiky-haired old-skool city smasher hurtling down the street shouting 'RAR RAR RADDL-A-RARR!' in the face of nobody in particular.
So when exactly was this Second Summer Of Love that Danny Wilson kept singing about? Those who were in at the whole Fleecey Fleecey-sporting waving-arms-in-a-field ground level would probably claim it was 1988. At the other extreme, anyone whose involvement was limited to thinking their radio had gone a bit funny would most likely point towards 1991, when something very definitely did get in the water Top Forty-wise and it was all Italio House Piano as far as the eye could see. Danny Wilson themselves would probably say 1989, because that's when their record was out. And Dominic Sandbrook counters that there was no Second Summer Of Love, at least not for anyone outside of a small elite hanging around outside Eastern Bloc records who had less than no impact on the daily lives of millions of people in Basingstoke, and anyway he thought Tricky Disco by Tricky Disco was rubbish.
When pushed, though, most people would probably suggest that the Second Summer Of Love took place in 1990. After all, that was the year in which the 'Madchester' bands and their ravey Adamski-type big-hatted chums briefly took over the charts, the ever-cheerful Graham Bright MP introduced his Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act in the hope of clamping down on those pesky young people enjoying themselves without obtaining written permission first, and the Ecstasy menace loomed so but-we're-her-fre-hundssss-invitingly large that the government rushed out a Public Information Film about Dexter Fletcher's friend falling off a bridge reaching for a Tracker bar or something. And, over and above all of this, 1990 was Time For The Guru. Unfortunately, nobody told Summer Chart Party.
For the benefit of those who are understandably left none the wiser by its Yahoo Serious Festival-compliant title, Summer Chart Party was a seemingly ubiquitous TV-advertised compilation album that gathered together some recent top pop hits to help your summer party, 'chart' or otherwise, go with a swing. And - helped in no small part by the fact that it appeared at the very dawn of Compact Disc, when choices were limited, parameters finite, and delusional beliefs that it would somehow now be possible to 'rationalise' your music collection were rife - it sold by the absolute bucketload, to the extent that it was not unusual to hear it blaring out from three neighbours' backyards hosting barbecues you weren't invited to within the same week. This it achieved despite being quite possibly the single worst compilation of all time; and yes, that does include Wig Wam Glam.
Surely, you'll be thinking by now, a public vote-courting collection of hits from the days when people actually still took notice of them can't be that bad? Well yes, that's what you'd assume. But that's reckoning without just how out of step Summer Chart Party was with changing trends, musical fashion, and above all anything even remotely connected to the concept of 'summer' in the first place. Summer Chart Party was the work of the short-lived yet terrifyingly prolific Trax Music, who spent around eighteen months flooding record shops with tepid re-recordings of songs from 'the musicals', comeback albums nobody wanted nor needed, and baffling all-over-the-place 'themed' compilations called things like Strollin' Seventies. Summer Chart Party was their one big attempt at scoring a million seller in the already oversaturated pop market, and - like someone who had read The KLF's The Manual and decided to do it slightly wrong on purpose - it followed an established successful format virtually to the letter.
A cursory glance at both the cover and the tracklisting makes it all too wince-inducingly obvious that the compilers - and indeed the designers - of Summer Chart Party were shamelessly attempting to emulate the Hit Factory compilations, those million-selling late eighties collections of recent Stock Aitken & Waterman-affiliated hits with the odd rare 12" extended version and little-known 'big across Europe' curio thrown in for added interest. As such, we get a substantial line-up of PWL-friendly artists; Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Pat & Mick, Rick Astley, Lonnie Gordon, Sinitta and, er, Damian - mostly with tried and tested hits from a year or two previously so that listeners mercifully get I Should Be So Lucky and Too Many Broken Hearts instead of Hang On To Your Love - alongside contemporaneous Smash Hits fodder from Yazz, Lisa Stansfield, Stefan Dennis and long-forgotten Eurovision hopeful 'Emma'. Oh and Jive Bastard Bunny, but we'll come back to them in a moment. Anyway, all of this would appear on face value to chime neatly with the prevailing What-Time's-Neighbours-On? mindset of the times, but trying to copy The Hit Factory on a compilation that proudly proclaimed itself The Sound Of Summer 1990 was a non-starter on two counts. Firstly, whether they had admitted it to themselves yet or not, Stock Aitken & Waterman's popularity was most definitely on the wane by the summer of 1990, and most of their earlier hits had been sold and resold to punters a million times over already, not least on the Hit Factory compilations themselves. Secondly, and more significantly, it was an album that smacked of the eighties at the dawn of a new decade that just couldn't wait to leave the eighties behind.
Ignoring the New Kids On The Block-sized elephant in the room, and just ignoring Deacon Blue in general, what the pop-hungry audience that only months earlier had been thrilling to the likes of Big Fun and Sonia really wanted in 1990 was some kind of rap-friendly rave-tastic pseudo-hip hop crossover, perhaps best exemplified by Betty Boo, and even Kylie had dipped her toes into audibly-off-her-face waters to tremendous effect on Better The Devil You Know. Not for nothing did Smash Hits attempt to go head-to-head with Summer Chart Party with the prosaically-titled Smash Hits Rave!, seeing their Yazz and Sinitta and raising them Sydney Youngblood and The 49'ers. To be fair, Summer Chart Party did feature a couple of tracks on this wavelength, presumably by accident rather than design, notably the tremendous Got To Get by Rob'n'Raz Featuring Leila K, Candy Flip's cover of Strawberry Fields Forever - occupying a not-particularly-party-enhancing slot midway through the parade of upbeat pop fun - and the much-better-than-you-remember-it waaaaargh-hargh waaaaargh-hargh waaaaargh-hargh wuwuwuwaaaaargh-hargh festival Ride On Time by Black Box. And while Erasure were somewhat devoid of common ground with the wide-trousered dancey types, it's nice to see the oft-overlooked Blue Savannah getting an airing here too.
On the other hand, this grudging concession to the rave-flavoured ambience of the time allows the point-evading woo-yeah festooned 'cover' of Venus by Don Pablo's Animals (or, if you will, lots of people in hats doing nothing in particular on Top Of The Pops) in through the back door to stink the place out, and amazingly that's not even the worst track on offer here. Nor even is Fairground Attraction's quick-say-'Ooh-I-love-this'-and-sort-of-jive-with-half-of-your-body-while-standing-stock-still-with-the-other 'real music' anthem for the terminally smug Perfect. No, that honour - in an alternate universe where 'honour' is a synonym for 'being hit with a cricket bat' - must surely go to That's What I Like by Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers. You know, the second one. With the Hawaii Five-O theme in it.
The kindest thing anyone could possibly find to say about the entire Jive Bunny phenomenon is that it was a shrewd idea; in every other sense, it was the culmination of some of the very worst trends of the eighties - the relentless rise of the 'medley', from Stars On 45 through The Sixties Mix, right up to this virtual entire wedding disco condensed into four minutes; the furious adherence to a decade-out-of-date notion that nostalgia for the fifties was in any way a good or desirable thing; the selling of novelty records on the back of shabby yet eyecatching videos; and the wilful provision of 'evidence' for the likes of Tony Parsons to further their not entirely sense-making theories about how pop music was only good in the past, and the fact that new pop music was simply regurgitating old pop music was a clear sign that new pop music was even more only good in the past than previously thought but old pop music was being made equally only good in the past or something. The Mastermixers were a bunch of faceless backroom boys who had put their inaugural rock'n'roll medley ('medley' being a generous term considering that it consisted of little more than the title of each song in rapid procession) together in the genuine hope of cornering the wedding disco market. Jive Bunny, on the other hand, was an animated figurehead seemingly drawn by a particularly disinterested member of the Why Don't You...? gang, who smugly popped up in front of archive footage of fuck all to do a couple of hand jives; particularly punchable at 3:26 in the video for Swing The Mood, though you do have to grudgingly admire the 'concerned' look it registers when Elvis joins the army.
Much like Summer Chart Party itself, That's What I Like simply repeated the earlier successful format note for note only using slightly less impressive source material, kicking off a long and tedious nosedive - you can't even really add 'diminishing returns' as that would imply that there were sufficient returns to diminish in the first place - to the point where even Pete Waterman was publically saying he would be embarrassed to be involved with the Jive Bunny franchise. And yet they ploughed ever onwards, flinging out threadbare medley after threadbare medley including the long forgotten likes of Can Can You Party?, Over To You John (Here We Go Again), and the truly odious Let's Party It's Christmas, although thankfully what little commercial appeal they had was totally eradicated when the 'Mastermixers' decided that they would like to appear in the photos instead of Jive Bunny.
As for Summer Chart Party - an album that did not contain a single song that could in any way be described as emblematic of 'summer' - it was an experiment that the 'backroom boys' would not see fit to repeat. The precise date of the Second Summer Of Love will likely remain in dispute for ever more. The First Summer Of Bewildering Compilations That Amazon Used And New Sellers Will Now Actually Pay You To Take A Copy Of, however, will always be 1990.
For a slightly better selection of music, you might enjoy this feature on 1985's Now That's What I Call Music spinoff Now Dance.
If you've enjoyed this article, you can find lots of similar ones in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society available in paperback here, or from the Kindle Store here, or as a full-colour eBook here.
Sing This All Together (See What Happens):
The big teenybop sensation of the day, who had a million impressionable teenage girls unhealthily affixing lager bottle tops to their shoes and developing an equally unhealthy fixation with Hitler Youth haircuts, Bros were hated like few teenybop sensations before or since, much pilloried by every publication from Viz to Record Mirror (who once ran a 'Draw A Moustache On Bros' competition). Having dispensed with bassist Craig Logan and apparently the lion's share of their at-least-commercially-sound songwriting ability, pop's top twins Matt and Luke Goss were keen to establish their credentials as 'serious' musicians, and this inevitably involved going a bit 'sixties'. FOUR POINTS.
Brought His Mellotrode And Freaked 'Em All Out:
While Bros were the only act in this contest to have adopted one of the major psychedelic tropes - namely taking one existing song (in this case, aptly-titled pseudo hard-rocker Too Much) and reshaping it as another in a sort of 'Part 2' gambit - they seem to have decided that was more than enough in the way of far out-ness. There's one of those backwards fade-in intros, a smattering of wah-wah guitar and tape loop backing vocals, and... well, nothing else really. At a push you could say it was attempting to ape new-fangled 'Acid House' psychedelia, but it doesn't even do that very well. TWO POINTS.
On The Bus Or Off The Bus?:
Just your standard English-as-a-foreign-language-greetings-card love song lyrics, of the sort that would have any girl with her wits about her running a mile. Absolutely nothing worth even joking about here. NO POINTS.
The Green And Purple Lights Affect Your Sight:
Just when it was looking so grim for The Brothers Grim, the video is a full-on visual assault filled with floating peace and love iconography, 'time tunnel' effects, colour washes, hand-fired 'energy bolts', scary Goss Arm mandalas and priceless shots of them dancing on a rotating flower. Great stuff! NINE POINTS.
I'm Picking Up Bad Vibrations:
Bros were well and truly done for career-wise by the time Madly In Love stalled at a record company-worrying number 14, as their fanbase had all but disappeared under the startling onslaught of New Kids On The Block. You kind of get the feeling they may come a poor second to Jordan and company in this here competition too. THREE POINTS.
Ha Ha Ha... We Blew Your Mind!:
Bros really do deserve some grudging respect as possibly the last successful 'boy band' ever to actually bother at least having a go at writing their own songs and playing their own instruments, but while Craig Logan would later put his knack for a commercial hook to impressively good use as a massively successful producer, songwriter and A&R man, Matt and Luke never quite did manage to impress the musos while also appealing to teenage girls, their only other notable moment coming with 1991's demented eco-gospel silliness Try, by which time they were all but finished. ONE POINT, which adds up in Grolsch bottle tops to a paltry NINETEEN POINTS.
Next Time - step into the twilight world with Swing Out Sister (though the song's not Twilight World, erm...)
Whatever it was that had got in the water in 1989 (and presumably it was some distant relative of that kerrazy 'acid'), you just couldn't move for music made by people trying to sound a bit psychedelic.
And not just the ultra-modern up-to-the-minute neo-psychedelia touted by the likes of The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Lightning Seeds and all those Euro-House outfits, which had broadsheet columnists straining at the leash to write something unfathomable about 'The Second Summer Of Love' (which, apparently, had something to do with shoes), nor indeed the
accomplished retro-inflected stylings of Julian Cope and XTC. No indeed not, as for some inexplicable reason, this extended right the way to mainstream acts of the sort that you wouldn't have expected to want to get 'a bit sixties'.
But 'get a bit sixties' they certainly did, even if most of them had virtually nothing resembling the first idea of what they were supposed to be doing, and this made for some... interesting results.
But which of these 'interesting' results came closest to the holy grail of sounding a tiny bit like 'The Beatles' as they were believed to sound by someone who had spent their entire life with a bucket wedged firmly on their head and professed not to like the bits on the Red and Blue compilations where it 'goes a bit flower power'?
Well, we're going to be spending the next few weeks addressing just this pressing concern, weighing up the seven likeliest contenders against each other by virtue of the following criteria:
Sing This All Together (See What Happens): Just who were the act in question, and how did they come to arrive at this rather peculiar artistic volte-face? Brought His Mellotrode And Freaked 'Em All Out: How heavily did they adopt phasing, sitars and other musical trappings of the original so-called 'Summer Of Love', and more importantly, how convincing did it sound? On The Bus Or Off The Bus: Did the lyrics espouse radical counter-cultural ideas or just sound like one of their regular songs only with a couple of mentions of 'rainbows'? The Green And Purple Lights Affect Your Sight: Was the video a far-out multicoloured assault to rival The Trip or did it just have them miming in a studio? I'm Picking Up Bad Vibrations: Just how savagely did an uncomprehending fanbase turn on them as a result? Ha Ha Ha... We Blew Your Mind!: And finally, how long did this hallucinogenic deviation last for? Clue: it normally wasn't very long at all...
So, join us on this Magical Mystery Tour to the centre of the Greatest Hits album - where such abberations are normally hidden in the hope of avoiding anyone noticing them - to discover just who was the most... A Bit Like The Beatles!
1. Danny Wilson 'The Second Summer Of Love'
Sing This All Together (See What Happens): Highly-touted ‘Sophisto-pop’ trio with too many hats get some sort of an inkling that there’s something in the air, and decide to jump on the bandwagon in their own special way. A bit like when people like Herman’s Hermits sang about flowers for one or two singles before they got spooked by that bloke from Procol Harum dressed as a druid on Top Of The Pops and went ‘normal’ again. Not off to a good start, then. THREE POINTS.
Brought His Mellotrode And Freaked 'Em All Out:
Hmmm, there’s really not that much in this that could warrant the label ‘psychedelic’, coming across as more of an updated pastiche of sixties West Coast harmony pop outfits than their more lysergically-frazzled contemporaries. Which, to be fair, was pretty much Danny Wilson’s usual musical template anyway. Still, you have to concede it’s very well done. FIVE POINTS.
On The Bus Or Off The Bus?:"Acid on the radio/acid on the brain/acid in the calico/acid in the rain". Outstanding. NINE POINTS.
The Green And Purple Lights Affect Your Sight:
A real big hitter from the days when having a ‘good video’ could still be a major selling point, this impressively realised effort sees the band mime to the song forwards whilst shoppers perambulate and bikinied lovelies leap in and out of swimming pools backwards. They also do some A Hard Day’s Night-esque spinning around on chairs and leaping about in jerky motion, and act the goat with giant L, O, V, and E letters on a hillside, ending up looking oddly like an insert from Jigsaw. EIGHT POINTS.
I'm Picking Up Bad Vibrations:
Always one of those bands whose profile and critical adulation seemed to far outstrip their actual chart statistics, The Second Summer Of Love was one of only two Danny Wilson singles to chart (they were very much an ‘albums band’ of course), and only managed a paltry number 23. Not that you’d know it from how often it was on the radio. SIX POINTS.
Ha Ha Ha... We Blew Your Mind!
Danny Wilson didn’t last too much longer, splitting up in 1991, and their ‘psychedelic’ phase lasted for considerably less time than that. Still, just about anyone you care to question will remember their two hits, and oddly the lesser The Second Summer Of Love in particular, which is more than you can say for most of their musical contemporaries, and which nets them a reluctant TWO POINTS. Which means they walk away – backwards – with a respectable TWENTY FOUR POINTS.
Next Time: it's the turn of Donnie, Danny, Jon, Jordan and Li'l Joe, as New Kids On The Block go puzzingly pop-psych...
